For this week's awesome stuff, we've got an assortment of technological tidbits for folks who like the customizable, the utilitarian, and the scientific.

Trickey: Any Key, Anwhere

For all the huge variety of input devices on the market, there is a surprising dearth of truly customizable ones. Some gamer's keyboards have settings and configurations and maybe a few modular pieces, but Trickey takes things to new level with a very simple idea: building the function for each key into the key itself, rather than into the board it connects to. This way, rearranging your input is as simple as popping out keys and plugging them in where you want them. It's a great idea that definitely has applications for gaming and a wide variety of design and creative tasks that use special software, but its one big drawback is the expense: unless the relatively small modular units can be brought down in price, building anything more than a simple four- or five-key custom interface is probably more than most people will want to shell out for.

The PocketLab

Smartphones have put a wide variety of advanced sensors into everyone's pocket, but as useful as this is, there are limits based on the fact that you usually want to keep your phone close and not put it in a great deal of danger. The PocketLab offloads these sensors — a barometer, accelerometer, thermometer, magnetometer and gyroscope — into a rugged standalone unit that communicates with your phone and the cloud. Now the readings-curious can strap it to a rocket, toss it off a cliff or subject it to whatever other abuse seems likely to produce some interesting data.

VIS: Useful Power

USB power banks are everywhere these days, with little to distinguish them other than price and capacity. But the creators of VIS realized that a portable battery can have all sorts of additional uses beyond charging your devices, and built them into a slick-looking unit. The VIS serves as a flashlight, and emergency lantern and — in an inspired bit of design that suddenly feels obvious — a jumpstarter for your car with the included jumper-cable attachment.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

We've seen plenty of different input devices, but it's pretty hard to displace the traditional keyboard and mouse combination. Touchscreens have their usefulness (but perhaps not on a 20" 4K display), and maybe someday gesture recognition will be more common outside of gaming. Ultimately, we're likely to see more and more options for how to best interact with various kinds of software, and that's a good thing. Here are just a few more examples of cool digital interfaces.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The QWERTY keyboard layout, which was created around 1875, was originally designed to prevent typewriter keys from jamming. This was done by arranging letters that were most commonly used together farther apart. While the QWERTY layout is still used today, it may not be the best layout for virtual touchscreen keyboards, so there have been many efforts to design alternative keyboard layouts. Here are just a few examples.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The future of keyboards could be really interesting... or we might be about to witness some truly cool UI train wrecks. Despite all the proposed improvements to it, though, the traditional QWERTY keyboard will probably never actually be obsolete. Here are just a few more "advancements" in the field of user input design.

from the we-waited-five-years-for-this? dept

Remember the Phantom? Depending on your perspective, this mysterious gaming console, first announced in 2003, was either a too ambitious product that could never get off the ground (living up to its "phantom" name in that it was almost never actually seen) or a big scam to part investors with money. Over the years, the company made many announcements, almost none of which it lived up to. The company was even sued by its own investment bank for fraud, and the company's founder was charged as part of a stock scam. At one point, people were shocked when the company hired a real gaming industry veteran as CEO, but once he left pretty much everyone thought the company was dead.

But... not so fast. A few years back it announced that it was ditching the gaming console concept, but was still going to come out with a neat keyboard that could be used for gaming. Of course, it promised that keyboard would be out years ago, and in true Phantom fashion, many delays followed. To be honest, I had thought the company had finally gone completely out of business, but Wired is reporting that it really honestly has a keyboard in production -- and it completely sucks. As Wired notes, it certainly wasn't worth the long wait. The only redeeming factor that Wired can find in the keyboard is the chance to own a piece of vaporware history. Just don't expect to actually use it, because you'll be wishing you didn't.